Development of Web-service Exam to Improve Integrity of Remote Assessment

COVID-19 and remote learning challenged the integrity of exams.At-home, unproctored, and web-based exams resulted in increased reports of students engaging in exam-taking tactics outside of the rules, restrictions and limitation systems that were intended to ensure independent student work without unauthorized references or help.Students could copy and paste a question into a web-service that would provide an answer, possibly after a prolonged delay.Multiple Internet connected devices thwarted lock-down methods and enabled communication and access to web assistance.The examination methods provided by typical learning management systems (LMS) did not seem adequate to ensure exam integrity.Without exam integrity, the following are diminished: the motivation for learning, the correlation between achieved competency and grade, and the value of the academic transcript or diploma.Certain inadequacies of LMS examinations methods that appeared to need attention included the following.Allowing cut and paste of questions that eased web-based searches or assistance.Lack of timed questions that enabled prolonged results of web-based searches or assistance to be returned and used for the same question.This paper will report an prototype web-based exam that attempted to address some of these issues in the development of a custom web-based examination service.A Google Sheets web-service was programmed, utilizing the programming languages of Google Apps Script, HTML and JavaScript.The exam web-service was suitable for certain types of questions, similar to multiple choice, so not appropriate for all scholarly assessment.The following features were intended to reduce the ease of unauthorized assistance.The questions were presented as an image, so more difficult to cut and paste.The student was only allowed a certain amount of time to answer a question to minimize use of webassistance that might require more time for a response.Each student received the questions in a different order to minimize the ability of students to take the test "together".Some limitations in the prototype included only allowing single-character answer and not allowing backtracking to review a previous question.The prototype of this developed web-service exam was utilized over four semesters in multiple courses.The results of this exploration will be presented.Development of new methods of student assessment that minimize unauthorized, and web-based assistance is necessary to maintain the value and quality of formal education.